Stephen A. Murphy Buddhist Landscapes of the Khorat Plateau: Art and Archaeology of the 7th–11th Centuries

The Khorat Plateau is a landscape of some 155,000 square kilometres of what is now northeast Thailand and central Laos. Despite the rich evidence for the region’s dynamism and development in the metal age, knowledge of subsequent first millennium developments on the Khorat Plateau remains limited.

This important new work, built on extensive fieldwork and archaeological surveys, reveals the Khorat Plateau as having a distinctive Buddhist culture, including new forms of art and architecture, and a characteristic aesthetic. Moreover, by combining archaeological and art historical analysis with an historical ecology approach, Murphy traces the outlines of Buddhism’s spread into the region, along its major river systems. He is able to read this history into and against the Khorat landscape, attending to the emergence of monumental architecture such as stūpas and Buddha images carved into the rock faces of hills and mountainsides, and the importance on the Khorat Plateau of the use of boundary markers, or sīmā. This book provides a new picture of the region in the first and early second millennia, adding to our understanding of the development of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and offering a new basis for other regionally-focused scholarship to thrive—from textual Buddhology to history to anthropology. It opens up new possibilities for understanding the early spread of Buddhism within different landscapes across Asia.

SERIES: ART & ARCHAEOLOGY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA: HINDU BUDDHISTTRADITIONS

October 2023

Hardback • S$78 / US$56

ISBN: 978-981-325-213-4

288pp / 235 x 187mm

15 maps and 95 images in full colour

Ella Raidel

Of Haunted Spaces: Cinema, Heterotopias, and China’s Hyperurbanization

As amalgams of the different spatial logics of other places, reassembled by globalization and the fantasies of real estate development, cities today are becoming what Michel Foucault has termed heterotopias. Assemblies of ruins, theme parks, entirely copied towns, simulacra, business districts on a globalized template, reconstructed historic districts, settlements, and ghost towns are finding a new expression in the contemporary world. Nowhere is this more visible recently than in China, and in areas coming under China’s developmental influence. Copied cities, ghost cities and large scale Chinese investments in Africa are heterotopias because they contain the idea of accumulating different times, cultures, and countries within one place, just as a theme park contains all these different place experiences in a bounded zone outside of its own time and culture.

Ella Raidel has explored these phenomena through film and cinematic virtual reality, and this artist’s book reviews and reflects on the last two decades of her award-winning work. In Ella Raidel’s films urbanism and architecture, theory, politics, social change and image production are intertextually presented, and open a discursive space for investigation and commentary. This book will be interesting for art and film practitioners, and students of architecture, film, urbanization, and infrastructure, especially those who see cinema as a way of exploring these subjects.

Ella Raidel is a filmmaker and visual artist. She is assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

DISTRIBUTED BY NUS PRESS FOR THE NTU CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

August 2023

Paperback • S$28 / US$24

ISBN: 978-981-18-5893-2

84pp / 190 x 250mm

80 Illustrations in full colour

Elaine Ng and H.G. Masters editors

Extreme Beauty: 12 Korean Artists Today

On the biggest international stages, from the Venice Biennale to museums around the world, contemporary art from Korea excites and challenges viewers wherever it is shown. In Extreme Beauty: 12 Korean Artists Today, leading curators and critics explore the complex creative practices of some of the most exciting artists active in Korea and internationally. From the ultra-minimal to the hyper-conceptual, the monstrous and the science-fictional, each of these 12 Korean artists and groups are highly original figures, having spent decades developing their unique styles and approaches to making art. Readers will get an inside look at the complex processes behind these artworks through this generously illustrated volume, which was designed by the acclaimed London-based creative studio Barnbrook.

Extreme Beauty features artists Koo Jeong A, Lee Dong-gi, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Lee Wan, Meekyoung Shin, San Keum Koh, Seulgi Lee, Mire Lee, Kang Seung Lee, Yeesookyung, Nam Tchun Mo, and Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho.

Elaine Ng is Editor and Publisher at ArtAsiaPacific. H.G. Masters is Deputy Editor and Deputy Publisher at ArtAsiaPacific. DISTRIBUTED FOR ARTASIAPACIFIC

December 2022

Paperback • S$42 / US$48

ISBN: 978-0-9896885-7-4

256pp / 190 x 254 mm

162 color plates

Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French

An important case study in the history of law under colonialism, Colonial Law Making explores the structural forces and contingent exchanges that shaped colonial law in Cambodia, draws comparisons across the region and examines Cambodia's post-independence colonial legacy.

The court of King Norodom and the temples of Angkor Wat became orientalist icons in the French colonial imagination, perpetuating an image of the Protectorate (1863–1953) as special and worthy of preservation. This contributed to a certain exceptionalism in the way the Kingdom was colonised, including through law. Drawing on previously unexamined archival material, Sally Low presents a comparative case study of French approaches to colonial law, jurisdiction and protection. Although the voices of non-elite Cambodians are largely absent from the archives, their influence on colonial law is evident as they resisted efforts to regulate their lives and their land. Low argues that the result was a set of state legal institutions and an indigenous jurisdiction that blended Cambodian and French notions of patronage and royal power as the source and authority for law. This work is a case study of colonial law as an instrument of control and administration in an indirectly ruled colony. It adds depth to our understanding of the impact of European colonial law and the significance of different forms of colonial rule—direct, indirect and unofficial. It is easily accessible for non-lawyers and is a must-read for those interested in the recent past of Southeast Asia and the countries that were previously colonised as French Indochina.

Sally Frances Low holds a doctorate in legal history from the University of Melbourne and has worked extensively in Cambodia and Southeast Asia.

September 2023

Paperback • S$38 / US$36

ISBN: 978-981-325-244-8

288pp / 229 x 152mm

2 maps, 6 b/w images, 1 diagram, 2 tables

Dwi Noverini

and

Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities

In selecting terms to refer to themselves and their addressees, speakers express, define and create a field for working out social relations. Because, up until now, sociolinguistic research in this domain has focused primarily on Indo-European languages, it has tended to dwell on pronominal reference to the addressee, for example the choice between tu and vous in addressing someone in French. This book theorises interlocutor reference more broadly, based on the study of Southeast Asian languages, thereby deepening our understanding of the ways in which selfother relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction. Bringing together studies from both small-scale and large, urbanised communities across Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia, this book is an important contribution to the sociolinguistics and anthropology of Southeast Asia. In addition, the editors’ introduction lays out a framework for investigating and analysing interlocutor reference in any language, in any part of the world.

Jack Sidnell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

February 2023

Hardback • S$42 / US$48

ISBN: 978-981-325-184-7

269pp / 229 x 152mm

3 figures, 11 b/w images,

1 table

John F. McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam and Gerben Nooteboom editors